Hi folks,
A quick update on the forum changes that have happened and why:
So a little while ago the way Google and Discourse (the forum software) managed email sending changed and there was no easy way to fix it. Email sending stopped working and this was an issues for many people.
Previously we ran a self hosted version of Discourse which meant a few things.
- We didn’t get any support from Discourse when we had any problems (we had to post to the community forums and hope someone would help)
- We had to maintain a virtual machine (in our case in Digital Ocean) to run the application on. We also had to sort out the backups.
While this wasn’t a heavy lift when it worked, when it went wrong it wasn’t ideal. We do have a team of people who shares the load of maintaining this but of course we don’t always have people available when there are problems.
So to correct the email problem and to help with overall supportability of the forum we decided to move to the hosted version of Discourse (which sends it’s own email directly). We get a discount being a non-profit but there is a minor increase in monthly cost. This has also been approved by the WCC board.
The hosted solution has meant we don’t get access to the backend as much but all the support and maintenance is done by Discourse themselves. We can also speak to Discourse support directly to fix issues.
There are of course some caveats:
- The big one is that events and the calendar has stopped working. With self hosting we could run any module we liked but the events / calendar is limited to the business plan which is 5X the cost and we just can’t justify. Polls are going to be the way forward. We are going to post some instructions and templates to help ride leaders with this and the Ride template now includes a single poll to get you started.
- With no server backend it means we have less ability to run scripts and hack away at the source. But we are trying to be more creative on changing the navigation to the forum to make items most often used front and centre.
I know there has been offers of help on the forum side in the past but some were put off by the scary linux backend etc. Now it is hosted it should be much easier to work with. If you would like to help improve the forum please reach out to me. There are some resources on how Discourse works here: Resource Center | Discourse - Civilized Discussion Just be wary that some of this refers to self hosted which is not usable by us.
Finally I wanted to give a big thank you for @VikramSubramanian for doing most of the work with the migration. He has been working with Discourse support sometimes as some very unsociable hours to get things migrated as seamlessly as possible. Without his help this would not have been possible.
If you have any questions or concerns feel free to respond to this post or message me directly.
Thanks
Oliver
